FXpansion has released Maul, a multi-band distortion and tone-shaping plug-in with advanced modulation.

Maul is suited to all music requiring powerful sound-sculpting abilities - everything from subtle warming and loudness generation to shredding distortion and experimental creative effects.

Maul features 3 separate drive stages, each of which can act on a different frequency range with any of 32 distortion types. The available algorithms include DCAM-modelled germanium diode, tube and transistor-based circuits, clippers, overdrives, waveshapers of various kinds and bit-crushing devices for digital distortion flavours. Each drive stage also features control over transient-shaping, saturation circuitry and additional post-process tone filtering.

The built-in TransMod modulation system allows you to animate Maul's parameters with the internal LFOs, envelope follower and sample & hold devices as well as with external MIDI note input. This turns Maul into an extremely flexible device capable of dynamic filter patterns, rhythmic gating effects with extra bite, loudness and harmonic excitation effects and wild, dynamic distortion that can transform your audio.